Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproot Wizards has postponed production of its ‘Quantum Cats’ collection for the third time, adding further embarrassment to the high-profile effort.
After the planned sale of the NFT-like digital art series was marred by technical issues on Monday, Taproot paused proceedings with a promise to resume 24 hours later. However, the plan was quickly abandoned and the sale postponed until Thursday. But late on Wednesday, on the eve of the resumption, another postponement was announced, until February 5.
About 3,000 of the cats are for sale, for a fixed price of 0.1 BTC each, so the offering could theoretically raise around $12 million – enough to easily exceed the $7.5 million in investor money the company last years raised.
Taproot Wizards says it underestimated the community’s demand to purchase the Quantum Cats. In a post on discovering bugs.”
“The coin website simply wasn’t performing as well as it should,” the post said. “Ultimately that is our responsibility and we should have done a better job of getting this right the first time.”
The Bitcoin Ordinals protocol caused quite a stir a year after its introduction, both good and bad. Effectively allowing NFTs to be minted and stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain in a similar way to other chains like Ethereum introduced a utility that was previously missing.
For some Bitcoin purists, however, Ordinals simply created unnecessary congestion on the network – and distracted from the original blockchain’s original mission of being a peer-to-peer payment network.
Read more: Casey Rodarmor: The Bitcoin Artist
